Dandelions, Ladders & God Everywhere

Genesis 28:10-19
June 14, 2026
Matt Goodale

When I was a kid, I believed dandelions were magic.

If you blew one just right, your wish would come true. Anybody else here believe that as a kid?

As a kid I also believed that trees talked to each other when their leaves would rustle from the wind. And I believed that every time it rained, God was sad about something, and when there was thunder he was mad.

As a kid the world was teeming with wonder and mystery and meaning.

But somewhere along the way, I grew up and someone taught me that magic wasn’t real. That trees don’t talk. That dandelions aren’t special. That rain is just part of a natural hydrologic cycle.  That thunder is just weather.

As I grew up, the world became a little less mysterious, a little less enchanted, a little less full of wonder. And somewhere along the way, I think my faith got a little smaller too—not because I stopped believing in God, but because I started believing God lived in fewer places.

Our story begins with Jacob on the run for his life. He has just cheated his brother out of his inheritance, he has deceived his father and made a real mess of things. Now he’s fleeing home with nothing but the clothes on his back.

The story tells us that Jacob comes “to a certain place.” I love how vague that sounds. “A certain place.” Not a famous place or a holy place or even a destination place he was aiming for.

Just a place. An unnamed patch of ground somewhere in the wilderness.

Jacob is tired from all his running so he finds a rock for a pillow—which sounds absolutely terrible—and he falls asleep.

And this ordinary patch of dirt where he rests his head is probably the last place Jacob expects to encounter God.

Honestly, many of us know what that feels like. Sometimes life brings us to these places we never planned on being.

And all of the sudden, like Jacob, we find ourselves wandering in the wilderness of a scary diagnosis. The wilderness of job loss and divorce. The wilderness of grief and loneliness.

The Bible calls that experience exile. A place in between places. A place where God often seems absent—it’s the last place we expect to encounter God.

And even when life isn’t dramatic, many of us know another kind of wilderness too.

It’s called routine. The alarm clock rings in the morning. You go to work. Come home. Run errands. Drive the kids around. Eat dinner. Wash dishes. Pay the bills. Go to bed. Wake up and repeat.

When Meghan and I moved to New Jersey several years ago we drove through Kansas. And let me tell you, it was 300 miles of the same fields, the same gas stations, the same McDonalds, mile after mile after mile.

Sometimes life feels like driving through Kansas. Mile after mile of the same thing. Nothing seems remarkable. You’re just moving from one day to the next, not really expecting anything out of the ordinary.

Jacob finds himself in a place like that.

In a place with no special significance. A wilderness place. A place in between places. Just a place to rest his head.

But while Jacob sleeps, heaven breaks open.

A ladder crashes down into the earth where he rests his head, stretching from earth to heaven. Angels move up and down upon it.

Notice something important here. Jacob doesn’t climb the ladder. God comes down to Jacob. This is important. Remember, Jacob has screwed up and that’s why he’s in this wilderness place. Jacob doesn’t pray the right prayer or figure everything out or realize he should go apologize for how he treated his family. He doesn’t earn anything. God simply shows up in this ordinary unnamed place anyway.

Or perhaps more accurately, God reveals that God was already there with him.

For when Jacob wakes up he says, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.”

And on this patch of land—where Jacob sleeps—that in reality looks no different from the other patches of land surrounding it—it’s essentially mile marker 237 in Kansas—it is here that Jacob builds an altar to dedicate this place to the LORD. “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Jacob names this unnamed place “Bethel”, meaning “house of God”.

God was already there in exile with Jacob, he just didn’t see it. I think that’s the real miracle of the story. Not that heaven touched earth, but that Jacob finally realized heaven had been touching earth all along.

Years ago when Meghan and I lived in New Jersey—after finally making it through Kansas!—I remember having expectations about where I could find God on any given day. I expected to find God in church and in my seminary classes. I expected to find God at Bible study.

I did not expect to find God in a psychiatric hospital.

I worked as a chaplain and each Wednesday afternoon at 2pm I held a small worship service in the most challenging unit at the hospital, Raycroft West 1. It was usually a disaster. Nothing ever went according to plan and it was a mess.

So one week we stopped trying to hold an organized service and instead just brough crayons and paper. That was it. Just a quiet room where the women could sit and color.

And who knew that God could do more through some crayons and paper than through organized hymns and sermons? Each Wednesday at 2pm, in the middle of the Raycroft West 1 unit, in a small back room that smelled like urine, ladders crashed to the ground and heaven touched earth. God was surely in that place, but we never had eyes to see it before.

Jacob wakes up and names the place Bethel—“house of God.” And this fascinates me. Because the ground where he slept didn’t change. The dirt was still dirt. He was still in the middle of nowhere in-between places. The only thing that changed was Jacob’s vision. He began seeing differently. And maybe that’s what faith is. Maybe faith is learning to see that the ordinary world is already full of God.

Barbara Brown Taylor wonders if we’ve unintentionally trained ourselves to look for God only inside church buildings. What happens when we forget that the rest of life is sacred and full of God?

What happens to hospital rooms and grocery stores and playgrounds and riverbanks? What happens to all the places where most of life is actually lived?

Jacob’s story suggests that God isn’t terribly interested in these categories and distinctions we make between sacred and secular, holy and ordinary, church and everywhere else. Because the God of Jacob keeps showing up in unnamed places, unexpected places, overlooked places, ordinary places.

Which brings me back to dandelions. I don’t believe dandelions grant wishes anymore and I know that rain is part of the water cycle. I know that thunder comes from rapidly expanding air.

And yet, I wonder if children still understand something that adults often forget. Children assume the world is alive with meaning and wonder. They instinctively believe there is more going on than meets the eye. And I don’t think they’re wrong.

The Christian faith tells us creation is filled with God’s presence. That the whole world is charged with divine possibility. Maybe Jacob’s dream wasn’t showing him something unusual. Maybe it was showing him what is always true.

That there are ladders everywhere. Angels everywhere. Heaven meeting earth in a thousand ordinary places.

So tomorrow morning, when you wake up—pay attention. Look again at the places you’ve stopped noticing. The kitchen table. The office. The grocery store. The hospital room. The school pickup line.

Because the world is far more alive with God than we imagine.

And perhaps, if we’re paying attention, we’ll discover what Jacob discovered long ago:

“Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.”

Amen.